SF0221 Much Ado About Nothing

I have a good friend called Glen who grew up near where I live now. His first house was on Bertram St in what was then the suburb of Burwood, which has subsequently been rezoned as Glen Iris. Running parallel to Bertram Street is Beatrice Street, and I often wonder about the process in the town planning office, whereby these thoroughfares were named after the two principal characters in the Shakespearean play, Much Ado About Nothing, the subject of this episode, the third act in our Shakespearean trilogy.

Bertram and Beatrice Streets are joined by Nerissa from The Merchant of Venice, Dion from The Winter’s Tale and Barbara, possibly a reference to Barbary, a character in Othello. Then, if we skip over the railway track and hop over Prosper Parade, not only do we find Hortense Street, possibly a tribute to Hortensio from The Taming of The Shrew (I bet you’re glad I didn’t do an episode on that subject), Florizel Street, again from The Winter’s Tale, and then, running perpendicular, Ariel Ave, a character from last week’s Tempest episode.

What’s going on here, one wonders. The work of a thwarted playwright? A complex commentary on the state of local government? A sneering trick at the expense of a town planner’s boss? Maybe we’ll never know.

That’s all by the way of much ado about nothing very much, ironically.

The town planners’ scheme, if such it were, was lost on my friend Glen who was happily oblivious of any Shakespearean connection until I pointed it out. I have another friend whose son bears the name James Joyce, and I’ve often wondered, but not dared to broach the subject, of whether she was aware of the Irish novelist. Still, it’s a perfectly nice name.

Yet more ado about nothing in particular.

The episode itself features a bevy of new artists. With 100,000 new songs released onto Spotify every day, that corresponds to a new song every second, so there ought to be enough new artists to choose from, but it doesn’t quite work like that. One of the joys of doing the show is that it forces me to listen to new – or at least new to me, artists, and it would almost be worth doing even without broadcasting it to all of you. Anyway, on this show debutants are, I believe, Built To Spill, Townes van Zandt, Ride, Ezra Furman, The Donnas and Tram. No reason why we’ve waited 221 episodes to hear from them other than the quality of everything that’s gone before.

We’ll be moving on from the Bard next time, but thanks, Will, it’s been fun.